Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off • Hacker News Board

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#51

Post by SXX » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:33 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #17

baggy_trough wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define exploitation?

Being sold a job working for a specific salary at 40 hours a week, and then being told to work 80+ hours a week without overtime in order to keep your job, and having all trace of your work removed from the credits if you leave. That's how the games industry works.

Except everyone who going for a job in games industry knows about it. It's not like people going for those 40 hours and unknowingly getting into modern slavery in a basement with their documents taken away.

There just too many people who want to make games and budgets are limited while competition is high. There is very few companies that are highly profitable, but majority of people wouldn't want to work for them.

Is it still shitty offer? Yes, but it's people's choice to work there.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#52

Post by mjburgess » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:35 AM UTC

freeAgent wrote: post #36

thaumasiotes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want the binomial distribution. ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/binom-dist-functi... , https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... if you want to use Excel; https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... ("B") for LibreOffice Calc.) 1/2^40 doesn't come into it. There are 67 relevant employees. Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at…

There’s an implicit assumption that the layoffs were evenly distributed and that the union bargaining team was also evenly distributed within the organization. If those aren’t true, this analysis is going to give deceiving results (could be either direction).

And also that the union employees were identical to others -- which is kinda demonstrably false. People who self-select as union leaders are likely to be different from the other employees in various relevant ways.

Modelling any of these assumptions yields an arbitrary probability of your own choosing.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#53

Post by Ylpertnodi » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:36 AM UTC

mbix77 wrote: post #48

[flagged]

Poor pay.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#54

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:36 AM UTC

hipadev23 wrote: post #22

Animats wrote: post #10

It's illegal.See "Discriminating against employees because of their union activities or sympathies" [1] Enforcement is weak, but it's illegal. [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...

They just acquired the company two weeks prior and layoffs are extremely common after one.

I don't think anyone is too worried about the layoffs, but these look like targeted layoffs, reinforcing the notion that union members / representatives are troublesome.

At the very least, for the sake of optics, they shouldn't have fired the union reps. Not all of them anyway.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#55

Post by the_other » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:36 AM UTC

ivolimmen wrote: post #49

I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.

In the UK, many IT roles can join the Communication Workers Union[0]

[0]: https://www.cwu.org/

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#56

Post by vanderZwan » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:38 AM UTC

freeAgent wrote: post #36

thaumasiotes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want the binomial distribution. ( https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/binom-dist-functi... , https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... if you want to use Excel; https://help.libreoffice.org/6.2/en-US/text/scalc/01/0406018... ("B") for LibreOffice Calc.) 1/2^40 doesn't come into it. There are 67 relevant employees. Given that 50% of all employees were laid off, what were the odds of at…

There’s an implicit assumption that the layoffs were evenly distributed and that the union bargaining team was also evenly distributed within the organization. If those aren’t true, this analysis is going to give deceiving results (could be either direction).

Isn't this a statistical catch-22? If being in a union increases the odds of getting fired… well, then there's nothing to discuss because that's illegal. And if it should decrease it because of fear of legal retaliation, wouldn't that make it less likely that this happened randomly.

This feels like the wrong conclusion to draw (especially the second part), but I suck at statistics so someone please explain where I'm off.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#57

Post by nemo44x » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:38 AM UTC

ivolimmen wrote: post #49

I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.

IT doesn’t traditionally gafe unions in the USA. Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces. They are also a likely reason why so many people here don’t like unions.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#58

Post by braza » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:41 AM UTC

rendall wrote: post #23

danjc wrote: post #5

Unions have existed by various names for all of time but I have a hard time sympathizing except in the case of blue collar/low income workers.

This is how unions weaken. Divide first, by implying that some class of workers are not worthy of collective bargaining agreements. Then conquer, because unions aren't powerful.

Agree mostly with that, but the issue is that in certain occupations where you have a high transitivity of professionals, monopoly of work, high income, and some sort of power law in terms of outcomes, and asymmetric info that can be on the weak side of the negotiation that can generate high payouts an union does not help so much.

For instance, blue-collar professions do not have much of these, so being out of any agreement would be a huge disadvantage for the worker; for technology in general (talking here about software engineers specifically, I do not know other workers in tech) an union would be beneficial but not critical since this professional has some of the attributes described above.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#59

Post by vanderZwan » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:41 AM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #57

ivolimmen wrote: post #49

I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.

IT doesn’t traditionally gafe unions in the USA. Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces. They are also a likely reason why so many people here don’t like unions.

> Teachers are unionized here and are one of the most powerful political forces.

This does not seem compatible with all the stories I've heard about underpaid teachers having to buy material for their students out of their own pocket. I'm sure it somehow ends up both being true in a twisted way, but it still sounds strange.

Re: Bandcamp's Entire Union Bargaining Team Was Laid Off

#60

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 7:41 AM UTC

ivolimmen wrote: post #49

I find it so weird to read these stories on how Americans cope with unionizing. In the Netherlands where I live it is very common and normal to be member of a union. Most branches have a union, IT sector is a "free sector" and does not have a union. My wife works as a teacher and she is member of a union.

IT here is also a priviledged sector, in that it's in most cases an employee's market - few people in IT have their job or the wages at risk, layoffs are rare, etc.

There are some unions for IT personnel, but they aren't very popular or well-known.

There's also the mandatory employee representation (called the Ondernemingsraad in Dutch); every company over 50 employees is required to have one of those. But again, this is rare in IT companies. In part because a few companies I've worked for, IT providers / consultancies, use the 'cell division' tactic (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celfilosofie), where a company is divided up into smaller cells of at most 50 people, either by geographic location or specialism, each operating as their own company (on paper).

On the surface this is clever because it means the colleagues will be able to know everyone, or a department is specialized, or a company's finances is more secure. But underneath, it means no cell will ever become large enough to require employee representation. On the surface there is no need because everyone is paid and treated well, but at the same time, another one of these was sold to investors and has shifted course, buying up companies across europe now. I think employees would like to have a say in that, but that's not good for the owners / shareholders.